


For What It's Worth

by Ellerigby13



Series: 2019 Valentine's Date-a-palooza [13]
Category: Ant-Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bachelor Auction, F/M, Flirting, Fluff, Requited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-07 03:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18612286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellerigby13/pseuds/Ellerigby13
Summary: For the flirtiest superhero this side of the Hudson, Pietro takes a pretty long time figuring out how to let Darcy know his feelings about her.  Given the fact that she's the one buying him for the Stark Foundation's bachelor auction, he's got to find a good way to make up for lost time.A ridiculously late Valentine's Date-a-palooza prompt :p





	For What It's Worth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dresupi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dresupi/gifts).



Darcy feels her cheeks fill with heat as she raises her number into the air, and again when Pietro’s eyes drift across the crowd and directly onto her.  His brow furrows with confusion for a moment, so he shields his eyes from the spotlight overhead. And then, the cheeky bastard, with a look of sudden realization, pastes on  _ the _ goofiest smirk she’s ever seen and actually frigging  _ winks _ at her.

Pietro Maximoff  _ winks _ .

She’s not sure whether she’s blushing from the wink or from secondhand embarrassment at the fact that Pietro Maximoff, all velvet tuxedo and thick curls she’s pictured raking her fingernails through an inappropriate amount of times, has winked at her.  Onstage. Like the big, gorgeous dork he is.

But then, when the following words leave Luis Espinosa’s mouth, Darcy’s about a hundred percent positive she’s blushing because - well -

“Goingoncegoingtwice - sold to my girl Darcy, ‘cause, like Darcy can show a dude a good time, you know?  Not like I ever had a good time with her like  _ that _ , she’s just hella fun and hella good at pinball, so you gotta be careful, okay, Petey?  You know Luis don’t get hustled by anybody for anything, but when she came with us to the arcade on, like, Fisherman’s Wharf, this girl hustled the hell outta me and my boy Scottie playin’ pinball - ”

“Luis,” Darcy says in a voice as both gentle and firm as she can make it.

“Sorry, girl.  Enjoy your date.”  Stepping aside, Luis grins at Pietro as he makes his way off the stage and down into the crowd to meet her.

“Congratulations.”  Darcy finds herself tucking her arm under his and wrapping a hand around his bicep, her fingers splaying out across the velvet with some idle purpose she doesn’t quite know yet.  “What do you have planned for our date then,  _ mače _ ?  A romantic candlelit dinner?  Walk on the beach under a full moon?”

She wrinkles her nose at him.  Months earlier, he’d caught her in the lab complaining to Jane about Ian’s decidedly unromantic habit of calling her over to watch him play Halo, which he’d only just discovered, for hours on end.

“It’s not like I have any problem with Halo.”  She’d ducked her head under her desk to hunt for a lugnut rolling away from the ever-growing visual transmission receptor Jane had been drumming up the last few months.  “It’s a great game. I dig the giant laser needle things. I just don’t get why…” She sighed, kicked her chair out from beneath her, and dropped onto her hands and knees to reach around in the blank space between her desk and the wall.  “...why I need to show up for two hours of Halo, six minutes of half-assed missionary, and then him passing out every single Saturday night.”

“What would you prefer, Miss Lewis?” asked a voice that was  _ distinctly _ not Jane’s.

_ CLANG. _

“ _ Son of a fuckity dicknugget _ .”

In the fraction of a moment that it had taken for her to register the throbbing at the crown of her head, she’d pictured just how ludicrous she must have looked.  An entire pencil-skirted ass poking out from under a workdesk, whining about her weekly routine.

“Mr. Maximoff,” she heard Jane say, equal parts surprised and stiff.  “What...can we do for you?”

Darcy’d proceeded into the Wiggle of Shame out from under the desk, clutching the lugnut in one hand and using the other to rub the slowly forming bump at the top of her skull.

_ God _ , he’d looked good that day.  All the Avengers looked damn good after their daily workout sessions, but there was something about the way that the skin tight gray tank top clung to Pietro Maximoff like a baby koala to a tree that...well, made Darcy need to look anywhere else.

“Not today, Doctor Foster.”  He fiddled with the pick between his teeth, as flippant as you could get.  “I’m waiting for Doctor Banner. He said he needed to look at my platelets for something?”  When neither of them responded, he rolled his eyes lazily towards Darcy. “Trouble in paradise, I hear.”

“Trouble in Nunya, Maximoff,” she grumbled, and busied herself with fixing the nut back onto...wherever it was probably meant to go on Jane’s ridiculous machine.

“You know what I would do, were I in such a...long and  _ loving  _ partnership?”  He’d stroked his chin almost thoughtfully, a playful glint shining in his eyes as he glanced down at her.  “I would make it my business to woo my lover, as often as I could. Give ‘em something to look forward to,  _ razumjeti _ ?”

She’d rolled her eyes at him at the time, and he’d had the wisdom to change the topic, ask Jane about the contraption they were working on, but now, five thousand dollars lighter (she’d ask Tony for an advance, and she couldn’t imagine he’d turn her down) and with the same man on her arm, she finds it a lot harder to roll her eyes and move on.

“I thought  _ you _ were the romance expert, here, Piet.  Something about...giving me something to look forward to?”

She eyes a table near the back of the ballroom as Luis announces the next bachelor with another hilarious, long-winded story about some small thing that had happened the other day, but the man on her arm steers her toward the door, so she follows.  When they’ve cleared the room, he flashes her perhaps the most mischievous smile she’s ever seen.

“Now, Darcy, are you presuming to be my lover?”

A violent flush washes over her face.  He’s grinning at her now, the laughter bright and shining in his eyes, and shakes his head.

“Do not look so flustered, little princess.  Too pretty to look at me like that.” He nudges her chin with his knuckle, and some inexplicable tingle floods her from head to toe.  “That boyfriend of yours know you bought me for the night?”

She doesn’t answer.  She and Ian had split up not long after the encounter in the lab, and, based on the consistency of the compound’s gossip mill, she has a feeling that he already knows the answer to that question.

“What would you do, then?” she counters, adjusting her dress so that the skirt falls a little more comfortably at her knees.  “Since you know so much about how to...what was it?... _ woo _ someone.”

He runs his teeth over his bottom lip in the most delicious motion Darcy’s ever witnessed.  His eyes flicker up and down her front, and she begins to feel uncomfortably hot.

“Let me show you.”

The Statue of Liberty closes at four, but with a gentle hand to the back of her neck (“helps avoid whiplash,” he’d curtly explained, before the world became a blur and suddenly she was a few hundred feet higher into the air), Pietro finds her a way to the viewing room at the crown of the building at ten at night.  It’s a tourist trap she hasn’t fallen into since her eighth grade trip, but looking out into the water late at night, with the lights of the city so close and yet so far in the distance, she appreciates being able to see it, just the two of them.

“ _ This _ is a gesture.”  She rests her hands on the railing, nearly afraid to look up at him.

“I told you, I aim to please,  _ mače.   _ I do regret, though, there’s no candlelit picnic ready for you.”  His hand ghosts down her bare arm, and stops at the crook of her elbow.  “It’s alright if I touch you like this?”

“Yes,” she says, almost too quickly, and, when she glances up, his expression is softer than she’s ever seen it.  She wonders how she never realized how lush and thick his eyelashes are, or the little flecks of silver in his eyes.

“You deserve things like this, Darcy.”  For maybe the first time she’s heard it, his tone is completely serious, firm and rumbling from his chest.  “To be surprised, treated. You’re an extraordinary person.”

“How can you know?”  It comes out quietly.  He barely knows her. The most they’ve spoken is in the lab, or in passing, and in between every time the Avengers get called away, it’s not like he’s had much time to know her.  “Pietro, how can you know?”

His hand finds its way up to her face, and before she can taste the sweet warmth of his lips, he tells her in the most tender voice she’s ever heard, “I don't know.  But you are.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed :)  
> Croatian:  
> Mace=kitten  
> Razumjeti=understand


End file.
